You mean you applied and were rejected from the design oriented schools because you had the wrong attitude for them? Or you mean you never applied to those kinds of schools in which case your point is pointless?

You mean you applied and were rejected from the design oriented schools because you had the wrong attitude for them? Or you mean you never applied to those kinds of schools in which case your point is pointless?

Will, you seem to "project" an awful lot about my attitude, if I recall you offering something like 'I would have a problem getting along with people in many offices' based on my "controversial" first thread. The reality is that quite the opposite is true, with me making an effort to get to know most of the undergrads in the "deficiency removal" part of our curriculum than did the other M.Arch. 3s were too insular to do so or thought that, as grad students, they were better than them. The other thing was that I was the most likely to make jokes at 2 am. The other similarly wired kindred souls were always great to have around in a studio, and we fed off of each other. (Even the nuns in grammar school let my irreverence slide because I was a good student. Imagine that.)

I expressed in my essay that I was interested in design because, with my parents being artisans, they had conditioned me to look at aesthetic matters - for their form, texture, and context - and that I was also interested in the technology that made architecture possible. I applied to 8 schools, with 7 of them being public. I got into 4. Of the 4 which rejected me, 3 of them were definitely skewed toward design and less toward technology, with the nastiest one, based on the feedback I got as to why, also being the one that was among the least prestigious as a university, overall. The 4th one of the 4, which sadly was my first choice, would be seen as a "comprehensive" school, but it was very popular with 3-year applicants. What is the definition of a "design-oriented" school? People use this term often, and I've never asked for a definition. My definition of such a program is one in which there is a design studio every term (which is the norm, anyway), has 2 environmental technology courses (which is the norm as well), has 1 instead of 2 construction courses, has 1 or 2 instead of 3 or 4 structures courses, and let's you do whatever the hell you want with the remainder of the credit hours, offering these "cool" seminars for topics that are more trendy and transient than they are relevant and enduring.

I also think that a lot of graduate architecture school committees make a lot of wrong judgments about the people they admit and easily get "wowed" by certain degrees as adding to the "discourse," like the poster here, an adjunct, who went nuts over the applicant with a cultural anthropology degree in a broad brush knee-jerk manner. As you know, "discourse" is sadly lacking in studios and theory courses. Most architectural students do not cross-pollinate each others' projects because many are introverts whose communication skills are somewhat underdeveloped. So many of my projects turned out better because I was NOT afraid to ask adjacent students "What do you think of this ... or that" relative to a design "fork in the road." I saw very few people doing that, with that conversation reserved for studio professors. I wanted to take advantage of being able to walk around and discuss, since many of us just sat at our desks in undergraduate ... and took notes and tests. I can also admit that, in any given academic term, I liked 20% to 30% of other studio member's projects more than mine. That said, my undergraduate was in business/commerce, which must have indicated "obtuse" to a committee seeing a lot of applicants for the slots.

My M.Arch. 3 class started with about 22 people IIR. We lost about 3. Of the remainder, 7 of us licensed and work in the field: aeronautical engineering (1), civil engineering (1), business/commerce (2), chemistry with a minor in art (1), art and art history (1), and psychology/liberal arts (1). The student who had the most difficulty and never set foot in an architectural office had a BFA in painting, who could do beautiful oils of landscapes, but struggled with 3-dimnesional manipulation.

So, that's my "attitude," or should I say "story" ... and how the numbers shook out.